The Church's treatment of Galileo

[ivanm]

The following link points to a long discertation about the Galileo affair.  As much as the writer tries to white wash the issue, Galileo was right and the Catholic Church had its head up its ass.

What more can you expect when you mix dogma with science?

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/history/world/wh0005.html

[Mornac]

Where did this claim come from, how did it come about?

--It’s rooted in anti-Catholic bigotry and was made popular in Protestant Europe in the post-rebellion period when Protestants felt the need to discredit the Church in any manner possible.

[Mornac]

The following link points to a long discertation about the Galileo affair.

--Just read the entire thing. Very well written and insightful. Thanks for the link ivan.
 

As much as the writer tries to white wash the issue, Galileo was right and the Catholic Church had its head up its ass.

--So you agree with Galileo that the Sun is the immovable center of the universe. You may want to rethink that one ivan.

What more can you expect when you mix dogma with science?

--The Church has never made a dogmatic statement on astronomy. On the other hand, science regards many of its astronamical theories as dogmatic.

[johnhp]

There is a lot of misunderstanding about the Galileo issue and everything that was involved.  One of the things, from the perspective of science, that we should understand, is that Galileo's observations, while accurate and acceptable to subsequent inquiry, were not at all certain in his time.  When i use the term observations, i mean that broadly but also in the very specific sense of his use of the telescope.  His observations could not readily be replicated due to a wide divergence in the quality of lenses at the time.

From the perspective of the study of the Bible, and it was his application of his observations to the study of the Bible that was the central issue, it is possible to suggest that Galileo overreached when he suggested that a biblical narrative was untrue -- rather than allegorical, for instance -- because its imagery was scientifically inaccurate.


What we rarely recognize fully in terms of the Galileo affair is that Galileo was an outlier in his time.  He was proceeding on ground and rules of evidence that were being constructed as he (and others) were carrying out their work (the theory of optics at the time did not explain or cover their work in astronomy).  This is what happens when you expand or transform a scientific paradigm (to use the language of Thomas Kuhn).  Of course, there are social consequences for the scientist who goes out beyond the accepted norms of a society's understanding of science.  i would not go so far as Paul Feyerabend, a major 20th century philosopher of science, to suggest that the treatment of Galileo by church authorities was just but it is understandable within its own time.  That said, i agree with John Paul II when he discusses the Galileo affair and places a good part of the responsibility for any injustice on the part of theologians who focused on the necessity of a literal understanding of biblical cosmology.

[Mornac]

I'm interested in what Catholics think about the treatment of Galileo by the Catholic Church.

Setting the Record Straight	Small | Large

Galileo : Making the Case for Faith & Science	Small | Large

[Undecided]

That's the funniest thing I've seen in a while.  I actually laughed out loud a couple of times.  Thanks for giving me something entertaining to watch while doing laundry.

The entire episode shows how religion and science were starting to diverge during that time period, and the reason we never want to live under a theocracy.